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Friday, September 13, 2013

A cooperation agreement was signed between the Brazilian Chamber of
Commerce and Industry (BCCI) and the British company Asswak Al Arab Publishing
Limited (AAAP) (the publisher of “ASSWAK AL-ARAB” magazine) in which Asswak
Al-Arab was named the media coordinator and marketing agent for BCCI in the
Middle East and North Africa.

As part of this agreement, AAAP will publish news and articles focusing
on Brazil’s dynamic business community. In particular, offering an insight in
to Brazil’s economic, Investment and corporate developments. Furthermore, BCCI
will translate AAAP’s magazine into Portuguese for distribution to its local
membership.

In addition AAAP, according to the agreement, will organize conferences
and seminars throughout the Arab-speaking world. These will, under the auspices
of BCCI, seek to promote Brazilian companies and products in the region and the
opportunities for Investment in Brazil as well as provide a platform for
improved economic and diplomatic relations between the Brazilian and Arab
business communities.

The President of the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Mr
Ghassan Saab said: "We are eager to bring Brazil to the Arab world,
something we have been exploring for quite some time. Following an in-depth
study, we felt that Asswak Al Arab was a natural partner given its reputation
and dynamic expansion. We are confident that they will be a key partner in
leading marketing and media coordination for BCCI in the Middle East and North
Africa."

Commenting on the Agreement the Chairman of AAAP, Mr Gabriel Tabarani
said: "We are delighted to partner with the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce
and Industry to help them engage in the fast growing Arab-speaking market. We
feel that we will be well placed to drive this, particularly as it coincides
with the upcoming launch of our daily website and internet-TV products.”

Putin is bluffing that Russia has
emerged as a major world power. In reality, Russia is merely a regional power,
but mainly because its periphery is in shambles. He has tried to project a
strength that that he doesn't have, and he has done it well. For him, Syria
poses a problem because the United States is about to call his bluff, and he is
not holding strong cards. To understand his game we need to start with the
recent G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Putin and Obama held a 20-minute
meeting there that appeared to be cold and inconclusive. The United States
seems to be committed to some undefined military action in Syria, and the
Russians are vehemently opposed. The tensions showcased at the G-20 between
Washington and Moscow rekindled memories of the Cold War, a time when Russia
was a global power. And that is precisely the mood Putin wanted to create.
That's where Putin's bluff begins.

A Humbled Global
Power

The United States and Russia have had
tense relations for quite a while. Early in the Obama administration, then-Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton showed up in Moscow carrying a box with a red button,
calling it the reset button. She said that it was meant to symbolize the desire
for restarting U.S.-Russian relations. The gesture had little impact, and relations have
deteriorated since then. With China focused on its domestic issues and with
Europe in disarray, the United States and Russia are the two major -- if not
comparable -- global players, and the deterioration in relations can be
significant. We need to understand what is going on here before we think about
Syria.

Twenty years ago, the United States had
little interest in relations with Russia, and certainly not with resetting
them. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the Russian Federation was in ruins and
it was not taken seriously by the United States -- or anywhere else for that
matter. The Russians recall this period with bitterness. In their view, under
the guise of teaching the Russians how to create a constitutional democracy and
fostering human rights, the United States and Europe had engaged in
exploitative business practices and supported non-governmental organizations
that wanted to destabilize Russia.

The breaking point came during the
Kosovo crisis. Slobodan Milosevic, leader of what was left of Yugoslavia, was a
Russian ally. Russia had a historic relationship with Serbia, and it did not
want to see Serbia dismembered, with Kosovo made independent.

There were three reasons for this.
First, the Russians denied that there was a massacre of Albanians in Kosovo.
There had been a massacre by Serbians in Bosnia; the evidence of a massacre in
Kosovo was not clear and is still far from clear. Second, the Russians did not want
European borders to change. There had been a general agreement that forced
changes in borders should not happen in Europe, given its history, and the
Russians were concerned that restive parts of the Russian Federation, from
Chechnya to Karelia to Pacific Russia, might use the forced separation of
Serbia and Kosovo as a precedent for dismembering Russia. In fact, they
suspected that was the point of Kosovo. Third, and most important, they felt
that an attack without U.N. approval and without Russian support should not be
undertaken both under international law and out of respect for Russia.

President Bill Clinton and some NATO
allies went to war nevertheless. After two months of airstrikes that achieved
little, they reached out to the Russians to help settle the conflict. The
Russian emissary reached an agreement that accepted the informal
separation of Kosovo from Serbia but would deploy Russian peacekeepers along
with the U.S. and European ones, their mission being to protect the Serbians in
Kosovo. The cease-fire was called, but the part about Russian peacekeepers was
never fully implemented.

Russia felt it deserved more deference
on Kosovo, but it couldn't have expected much more given its weak geopolitical
position at the time. However, the incident served as a catalyst for Russia's
leadership to try to halt the country's decline and regain its respect. Kosovo
was one of the many reasons that Vladimir Putin became president, and with him,
the full power of the intelligence services he rose from were restored to
their former pre-eminence.

Western Encroachment

The United States has supported,
financially and otherwise, the proliferation of human rights groups in the
former Soviet Union. When many former Soviet countries experienced revolutions
in the 1990s that created governments that were somewhat more democratic but
certainly more pro-Western and pro-American, Russia saw the West closing in.
The turning point came in Ukraine, where the Orange Revolution generated what
seemed to Putin a pro-Western government in 2004. Ukraine was the one country
that, if it joined NATO, would make Russia indefensible and would control many
of its pipelines to Europe.

In Putin's view, the non-governmental
organizations helped engineer this, and he claimed that U.S. and British
intelligence services funded those organizations. To Putin, the actions in
Ukraine indicated that the United States in particular was committed to
extending the collapse of the Soviet Union to a collapse of the Russian
Federation. Kosovo was an insult from his point of view. The Orange Revolution
was an attack on basic Russian interests.

Putin began a process of suppressing
all dissent in Russia, both from foreign-supported non-governmental
organizations and from purely domestic groups. He saw Russia as under attack,
and he saw these groups as subversive organizations. There was an argument to
be made for this. But the truth was that Russia was returning to its historical
roots as an authoritarian government, with the state controlling the direction
of the economy and where dissent is treated as if it were meant to destroy the
state. Even though much of this reaction could be understood given the failures
and disasters since 1991, it created a conflict with the United States. The
United States kept pressing on the human rights issue, and the Russians became
more repressive in response.

Then came the second act of Kosovo. In
2008, the Europeans decided to make Kosovo fully independent. The Russians
asked that this not happen and said that the change had little practical
meaning anyway. From the Russian point of view, there was no reason to taunt
Russia with this action. The Europeans were indifferent.

The Russians found an opportunity to
respond to the slight later that year in Georgia. Precisely how the
Russo-Georgian war began is another story, but it resulted in Russian tanks
entering a U.S. client state, defeating its army and remaining there until they
were ready to leave. With the Americans bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, no
intervention was possible. The Russians took this as an opportunity to deliver
two messages to Kiev and other former Soviet states. First, Russia,
conventional wisdom aside, could and would use military power when it chose.
Second, he invited Ukraine and other countries to consider what an American
guarantee meant.

U.S.-Russian relations never really
recovered. From the U.S. point of view, the Russo-Georgia war was naked
aggression. From the Russian point of view, it was simply the Russian version
of Kosovo, in fact gentler in that it left Georgia proper intact. The United
States became more cautious in funding non-governmental organizations. The
Russians became more repressive by the year in their treatment of dissident
groups.

Since 2008, Putin has attempted to
create a sense that Russia has returned to its former historic power. It
maintains global relations with left-wing powers such as Venezuela, Ecuador,
Bolivia and Cuba. Of course, technically Russia is not left wing, and if it is,
it is a weird leftism given its numerous oligarchs who still prosper. And in
fact there is little that Russia can do for any of those countries, beyond
promising energy investments and weapon transfers that only occasionally
materialize. Still, it gives Russia a sense of global power.

In fact, Russia remains a shadow of
what the Soviet Union was. Its economy is heavily focused on energy exports and
depends on high prices it cannot control. Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg,
life remains hard and life expectancy short. Militarily, it cannot possibly
match the United States. But at this moment in history, with the United States
withdrawing from deep involvement in the Muslim world, and with the Europeans
in institutional disarray, it exerts a level of power in excess of its real
capacity. The Russians have been playing their own bluff, and this bluff helps
domestically by creating a sense that, despite its problems, Russia has
returned to greatness.

In this game, taking on and besting the
United States at something, regardless of its importance, is critical. The
Snowden matter was perfect for the Russians. Whether they were involved in the
Snowden affair from the beginning or entered later is unimportant. It has created
two important impressions. The first is that Russia is still capable of
wounding the United States -- a view held among those who believe the Russians
set the affair in motion, and a view quietly and informally encouraged by those
who saw this as a Russian intelligence coup even though they publicly and
heartily denied it.

The second impression was that the
United States was being hypocritical. The United States had often accused the
Russians of violating human rights, but with Snowden, the Russians were in a
position where they protected the man who had revealed what many saw as a
massive violation of human rights. It humiliated the Americans in terms of
their own lax security and furthermore weakened the ability of the United
States to reproach Russia for human rights violations.

Obama was furious with Russia's
involvement in the Snowden case and canceled a summit with Putin. But now that
the United States is considering a strike on the Syrian regime following its
suspected use of chemical weapons, Washington may be in a position to deal a
setback to a Russia client state, and by extension, Moscow itself.

The Syria Question

The al Assad regime's relations with
Russia go back to 1970, when Hafez al Assad, current President Bashar al
Assad's father, staged a coup and aligned Syria with the Soviet Union. In the
illusion of global power that Putin needs to create, the fall of al Assad would
undermine his strategy tremendously unless the United States was drawn into yet
another prolonged and expensive conflict in the Middle East. In the past, the
U.S. distraction with Iraq and Afghanistan served Russia's interests. But the
United States is not very likely to get as deeply involved in Syria as it did
in those countries. Obama might bring down the regime and create a Sunni
government of unknown beliefs, or he may opt for a casual cruise missile
attack. But this will not turn into Iraq unless Obama loses control completely.

This could cause Russia to suffer a
humiliation similar to the one it dealt the United States in 2008 with Georgia.
The United States will demonstrate that Russia's concerns are of no account and
that Russia has no counters if and when the United States decides to act.

The impact inside Russia will be
interesting. There is some evidence of weakness in Putin's position. His
greatest strength has been to create the illusion of Russia as an emerging
global power. This will deal that a blow, and how it resonates through the
Russian system is unclear. But in any event, it could change the view of Russia
being on the offensive and the United States being on the defensive.

Putin made this a core issue for him. I
don't think he expected the Europeans to take the position that al Assad had
used chemical weapons. He thought he had more pull than that. He didn't. The
Europeans may not fly missions but they are not in a position to morally
condemn those who do. That means that Putin's bluff is in danger.

History will not turn on this event,
and Putin's future, let alone Russia's, does not depend on his ability to
protect Russia's Syrian ally. Syria just isn't that important. There are many
reasons that the United States might not wish to engage in Syria. But if we are
to understand the U.S.-Russian crisis over Syria, it makes sense to consider
the crisis within in the arc of recent history from Kosovo in 1999 to Georgia
in 2008 to where we are today.

-This article was published by Stratfor Global
Intelligence on 10/09/2013

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...